Verity Lush

COMMENT: All agencies must to held to account for Anne Savidge’s tragic death

Perhaps this was because my friends didn’t want to urinate on my pregnancy parade, or perhaps it’s evolutionary instinct, ensuring the continuation of the human race.

Before I gave birth, I had a vision of family life. Essentially, we would all look as though we had rolled around in a Cath Kidston store, smothered in glue, before skipping back out draped in whatever had stuck to us.

You can imagine my shock after giving birth and returning home with my newborn.

For starters, she made it sound as though an entire farmyard had invaded our bedroom, and secondly, she refused point blank to sleep during the hours of darkness.

Nobody told me that I would spend each night feeling as though my eyeballs were being sucked out of my skull through a straw, while I gamely continued batting my baby in the face with a giant mammary.

The memory of standing over the bathroom sink and effectively milking myself is a particularly special one.

I also recall the visits from the midwives in the days following the birth, and my husband’s fury when one of them traipsed in with a chipolata of puppy poo stuck to the heel of her boot.

Those were the days when we could still take pride in our surroundings, because nobody had yet thought to flick Weetabix and sick about the place.

I sat on the sofa, clutching my c-section wound, wondering how it had come to this.

I hadn’t seen my own feet in six months, each time I moved a different part of me leaked, and after having a bath I had to lift up my swinging stomach and use a hairdryer to dry my c-section scar. Nice.

Eventually, three weeks after the birth, demented with exhaustion, my husband and I burst into tears together.

We clung to each other and he suggested that he had post-natal depression.

Luckily, neither of us had anything of the sort.

Eventually life settled down, we all slept again, and one year on, nostalgia set in.

We began to miss those days: the feel and smell of that newborn weight, warm and fragile in tired arms.

Nine months after the nostalgia set in, we welcomed daughter number two. And invested in a 2,100 watt AC professional strength hairdryer.

· Verity Lush is a 36-year-old mum-of-two who lives in Portsmouth. She is a tutor in philosophy, English and maths and has written a book for newly-qualified teachers, plus textbooks and articles for teaching magazines and supplements. Follow her on Twitter @lushnessblog